Confusing race and class again
I understand the tendency among liberals to make just about everything a question of race* but I prefer looking at most issues through the prism of socio-economic class instead. Here’s Jamelle Bouie on the race-gap in the finance world, riffing off of this provision in the new financial reform law which gives the federal government the power to cut off contracts with firms that “fail to ensure the ‘fair inclusion’ of women and minorities”:
Conservatives are predictably infuriated by this provision, but if you’re okay with idea of minority-hiring preferences, it makes perfect sense given the demographics of the financial service industry — particularly at the management level. As of 2008, according to a report released this year by the Government Accountability Office, white males held 64 percent of management-level positions in the financial services industry. White women held 26 percent of those positions, with the remaining 10 percent filled out by minorities.
[…]
This is all speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could trace the targeting of minority communities with subprime mortgages to the fact that there are vanishingly few minorities working on the management level in the financial services industry. By encouraging companies to change that, it’s possible that the provision could help prevent a recurrence of the past few years.
Of course, having a more diverse workforce in any given industry is preferable if only because diversity increases the wealth of knowledge and skill for any company or industry. Having people from a diverse set of racial and cultural backgrounds is simply smart business, because these people will bring knowledge and experience to the table that rich white guys might not be able to provide. Hiring women and minorities makes sense from a business standpoint, and I think we’ll see that trend continue regardless of government intervention.
The problem with Jamelle’s assessment is that when it comes to finance, the real gap – as usual – isn’t a racial gap at all, but a socio-economic one. Wall Street and the movers and shakers in the banking and investment world are plucked from the upper crust or at least the upper-middle-crust. The Ivy League is the lifeblood of the investment banker class. I don’t see that changing even if more women and minorities join the ranks. They’ll just be Ivy League women and minorities. The poor blacks and whites and Hispanics will still be completely unrepresented.
Whether there’s any way around that gap is a much harder question. It’s one thing for the government to mandate racial or sexual ‘fairness’ and another altogether to bridge the class gap.
*Conservatives are often guilty of this as well but for different reasons than what I’d like to discuss here.
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Mr. Kain,
You wrote:”The problem with Jamelle’s assessment is that when it comes to finance, the real gap – as usual – isn’t a racial gap at all, but a socio-economic one.”
You are absolutely right while simultaneously being quite wrong.
In the United States, race and class are tightly intertwined. If we understand “race” to be a social category and not a biological one, i.e. it has little to do with the actual color of anyone’s skin, then it can be stated that one’s race strongly predicts which class you will belong to. Black people constitute just over 10% of the US population but make up over 30% of the poor people (no matter how you define that). You can produce similar statistics for Native Americans and Hispanics. If you are white, you are less likely to be poor despite the fact that the majority America’s poor are white.
This has played a critical role in US politics. Wealthy white people have historically extended certain benefits to poor white people to win their support politically. While the poor whites could be every bit as hungry and thread-bare as their Black neighbors, they could count on some small benefit from being white, even if it was some meager civil service job. It was just a few decades ago that jobs like that were reserved solely for whites. The same was true for public education. This is the heart and soul of “White Supremacy”, the political alliance of poor and wealthy whites against the rights and economic success of Black people.
It is impossible completely separate race and class in the United States.
I have to disagree with davidlosangeles. I have fallen prey to the exact concept Erik is addressing. The socio-economic elite no doubt use race to enhance their ideology, money is the more important quantifier. No bucks, no entry; no matter ones ethnicity. The poor, by definition, will always be unrepresented amongst the monied elite.